What are your opinions on using transgender vs using transexual? Ive been seeing more trans feminine people use transexual to refer to themselves these days and I thought I had it figured out but im confused. Originally, how i saw it was transphobic dolls trying to distance themselves from the rest of the transgender community at large. But the more i read about trans theory and talk to trans women, im finding more and more "cool" trans women calling themselves transexuals. What am I missing?
Transsexual can only ever make sense to me as a term that means "associating with one sex more than the one arbitrarily assigned to you at birth" and I feel like most other definitions would be suspicious at best and outright caustic at worst. I see no reason to meaningfully distinguish between pre or post-op trans people using the term, when the term has historically been used to refer to both. And attempting to narrow it just seems short sighted and even somewhat selfish.